xoJane - Jessie Lochriehttp://www.xojane.com/author/jessie-lochrie
enCopyright 2015 Say Media, Inc.http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rssTue, 03 Mar 2015 12:20:39 -0800Obnoxiously Objectifying Thursday: Ben Whishaw<!-- tml-version="2" --><p>I came to <em>The Hour</em> late, despite the fact that it contains all my favourite things - feisty girl reporters, glamorous period-appropriate outfits, Anna Chancellor - but now I wonder what I was doing with my life before I pretended to be Bel Rowley on a daily basis. Of course, I try to be Bel, but deep down I’m Freddie - scruffy, principled, a bit of a sulky child and totally brilliant. Ahem.</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01bbb4b34001a048"><figure><img src="http://a1.files.xojane.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI0ODkyMDk2MTExODQ4MDY3.jpg" /></figure></div><p>Which brings us to the object of this week’s lust. Ben Whishaw. Freddie. Q. Peter Pan, in an upcoming West End play with Dame Judi of Dench, who he probably knows well enough to call ‘Jude’. He probably even has her mobile number. He probably texts her all the time. That’s just how cool he is. And did I mention the cheekbones? You could cause someone a serious injury with those.</p><p>At this point my girlfriend of ten years (who, by the time you’re reading this, will be my wife) points out, “Baby, you noticed he’s a boy, right?”</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01bbb4b37001a048"><figure><img src="http://a1.files.xojane.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI0ODkyMDk2OTE3MTg0NTg0.jpg" /></figure></div><p>Yes, Mr Whishaw lacks the requisite number of X chromosomes to be my regular type. Yes, he has stubble in places the objects of my attraction do not usually have stubble. I don’t think he has a penis, though, I prefer to think that he keeps a bottle of Grey Goose vodka down there for emergencies. Or perhaps a flask of tea. So he’s a boy, I’m a lesbian. Our love was not meant to be. But who cares? He’s pretty.</p><p>As well as having cheekbones so sharp they sliced through today’s bout of writer’s block, he’s not too shabby in the acting stakes.</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01bbb4b470019512"><figure><img src="http://a2.files.xojane.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI0ODkyMTAwOTQzNjg2Mjc1.jpg" /></figure></div><p>He first came to my attention as the scent-obsessed murderer in <em>Perfume</em>, although IMBD reliably informs me that I’d seen him in half a dozen films before that, giving solid, reliable performances in smaller roles before getting to smoulder in the limelight, first playing sexually ambiguous, teddy-bear clutching Sebastian Flyte in <em>Brideshead Revisited</em> and then as poet John Keats in <em>Bright Star</em>, where even Victorian sideburns and a nasty case of tuberculosis failed to dim his beauty.</p><p>He even pulled off playing the notoriously-hard-to-get-right Ariel to Helen Mirren’s Prospero in a film of<em> The Tempest</em>, banishing all my English Lit A Level-related PTSD about the play.</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01bbb4b49001c80a"><figure><img src="http://a5.files.xojane.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI0ODkyMTAxNzQ5MDIyNzky.jpg" /></figure></div><p>His most recent -and biggest budget - effort is the new Q in the rebooted Bond films. Gone are the creepy old dudes who like making shit explode, and in their place a speccy, parka-wearing geek with emo glasses and plenty of snark. With his cardigans and his glasses and Scrabble mug and disapproving glare, he makes me come over all unnecessary - and this is a film that also stars the girlcrush of my heart, Naomi Harris (and Judi Dench. Oh, don’t look at me like that. You would).</p><p>Also, if you scroll through the ‘00Q’ tag on Tumblr, lots of very kind people who are good with Photoshop have posted pictures where it looks as though he’s making out with Daniel Craig. Hey, if you’re lusting after your not-usually-preferred gender, you might as well go the whole way.</p><p>Actually, that one goes for Messrs Craig and Whishaw as well. Just make sure you press ‘record’, boys.</p>He’s a boy, I’m a lesbian. Our love was not meant to be. But who cares? He’s pretty.http://www.xojane.com/fun/obnoxiously-objectifying-thursday-ben-whishaw
http://www.xojane.com/fun/obnoxiously-objectifying-thursday-ben-whishawFunThu, 14 Feb 2013 05:30:00 -0800Jessie LochrieWhy My MA In Gender Studies Made Me A Better Feminist <!-- tml-version="2" --><p></p><div tml-image="ci01bbb461b0012a83" tml-image-caption="&lt;p&gt;Proudly clutching my MA in Sexual Dissidence &amp;amp; Cultural Change in my hand...&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;"><figure><img src="http://a4.files.xojane.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI0ODkxNzQ1NTM1MTY5ODEw.jpg" /><figcaption>&lt;p&gt;Proudly clutching my MA in Sexual Dissidence &amp;amp; Cultural Change in my hand...&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;</figcaption></figure></div><p>My name’s Kaite, and I’m a recovering academic. I was all set for a PhD and a life of obscure Victorian novelists and queer theory, until I failed to get funding, took a year out and somehow accidentally became a journalist instead.</p><p>Now I’m that annoying girl in the pub, analysing Doctor Who from a feminist perspective whilst quoting Judith Butler (although I do sometimes still get <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chicks-Unravel-Time-Journey-Through/dp/1935234129">paid for doing it</a>).</p><p>PhD or not, theory is and will always be integral to my feminism - it gives me words for how I view the world, and as a writer words are how I view the world. But feminism, like theory, is not one size fits all. And that’s OK - you don’t have to be an expert in criticism provided you still think critically.</p><p>Last week, the editors of <a href="http://vagendamag.blogspot.co.uk/">Vagenda</a> defended what they called “populist feminism” <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2012/10/defence-caitlin-moran-and-populist-feminism">in the form of Caitlin Moran</a>, arguing that “issues of race, class, religion, sexuality, politics and privilege often end up fracturing feminist dialogue, most regularly causing disagreements between those armed with an MA in Gender Studies and a large vocabulary to match, and those without.” They quoted the oft-re-tweeted line “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit” as an example.</p><p>Perhaps if they’d done an MA in Gender Studies they’d have attributed it to <a href="http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/10/10/my-feminism-will-be-intersectional-or-it-will-be-bullshit/">Flavia Dzodan</a>, but they didn’t. Then again, knowing that when you’re quoting someone, you need to give their name isn’t academic - like a lot of feminist theory, intersectionality included, it’s just good manners.</p><p>Let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge that the implications about race and class in their article are the real problem - a lot has been written, and <a href="http://stavvers.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/how-to-be-better-on-intersectionality-privilege-and-silencing/">written</a><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/caitlin-moran-and-lena-dunham-are-great-but-take-note-vagenda--feminism-isnt-just-a-white-middle-class-movement-8223102.html">well</a>, laying out just where the problems are. It’s not my intention to detract from those arguments by discussing the problems I have with another one of the points - namely, that by its nature feminist theory is inaccessible and alienating unless you’ve studied it at length, and that if you can’t rattle off a few Irigaray quotes at the drop of a hat, ‘academic feminists’ will see you as somehow less.</p><p>After focusing heavily on feminist, queer and gender theory as an undergraduate, I did an MA in Sexual Dissidence &amp; Cultural Change. On abandoning an academic career - and thus dooming myself to a life of silent parental disappointment on behalf of my own personal patriarch - I worried that my MA would only be useful as an ice-breaker in interviews, or as a really good ‘chat-up line - “hey girl, I have an MA in sex!”</p><p>Instead, it’s proved surprisingly useful. It’s helped my journalistic career - when I’m hustling for a job writing about heteronormativity or the bollocks that is binary conceptions of gender, it’s nice to have proof of the knowledge I’m trading for money - and it comes in handy when debating with mansplaining sexists, although that’s partly because of the rather heavy frame.</p><p>However, it hasn’t made me a better feminist than someone who never went to university. It doesn’t make me a better feminist than Holly and Rhiannon. <em>It just made me a better feminist than I was before</em>.</p><p>Part of what made the course so valuable were the critiques we made of it. Whilst revelling in my safe space and being surrounded by other like-minded queer people in the first week, one of my fellow students commented that both the content of the course and Brighton itself - my wonderful liberal Mecca! - were ovewhelmingly white, and that she felt like an outsider.</p><p>It was my first encounter with the idea that one kind of privilege - in this case, straight - could be cancelled out by lack of another. And looking back, that embarasses me - it took me until I was 22 to realise that? Really?</p><p>Thanks to the discussions of intersectionality in the feminist blogosphere and Twittersphere and whatever-comes-nextsphere, it’s increasingly unlikely that the next generation of feminists will be so advanced in years by the time they come to that conclusion.</p><p>It doesn’t matter where you get your knowledge from - and with university fees skyrocketing, fewer and fewer people will get the chance to benefit from the kind of postgraduate education I did - it just matters that you get it from somewhere. That you educate yourself.</p><p>And making mistakes is fine, even if it’s publicly trashing the importance of intersectionality in a public forum, provided you learn from it.</p><p>I used to revere Germaine Greer. I felt such a sense of relief when, at 18, I read <em>The Whole Woman</em> and realised I wasn’t the only one who had a problem with being told to shave my body hair or that my periods were disgusting. The chapter on trans women made me uncomfortable, but not outraged.&nbsp;Re-reading it earlier this year, before speaking on the body image panel at the Southbank Centre’s <a href="http://ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk/wow">Women of the World</a> festival made me cringe.</p><p>I’ve learned as much from the writers I’ve rejected as I have the ideas I’ve embraced. I’ve learned that having some seriously valid points about misogyny doesn’t give you a free pass on creating just as limited a definition of what a woman is or should be.</p><p>I’ve learned some of that from university, some of it from my own reading, but I’ve benefited from an environment where reading widely and critiquing what you read is encouraged.</p><p>What I’ve learned in the years since Richard Attenborough handed me my Masters degree - and I said, in a mild burst of insanity, ‘I really loved you in Jurassic Park!’ - is that we can create that environment wherever we go.</p><p>Academic debates are as valuable as arguments in the pub and they can - they should - overlap. Since graduating, I’ve learned as much about feminist/gender/queer theory from Twitter and fan fiction as I did at university. And that’s how it’s supposed to be.</p><p>No one wants to keep feminism or theory locked up in an ivory tower - ideas are meant to be shared, disseminated as widely as possible. They mutate, some get discarded, new ones get adopted and then get written about by academics rather than the other way around.</p><p>This stuff is awesome, and it's for everyone.</p><p>And everything we talk about when we’re defending women’s rights? That’s feminist theory. Not having a degree doesn’t make you any less capable of understanding that a feminism that only cares about white, straight, middle-class, cis women is no feminism at all.</p><p>Put that way, intersectionality isn’t that complicated. Because you don’t have to quote feminist theory to be a good feminist. You just have to practice it.</p>No one wants to keep feminism or theory locked up in an ivory tower - ideas are meant to be shared, disseminated as widely as possible. This stuff is awesome, and it's for everyone.http://www.xojane.com/issues/why-my-ma-in-gender-studies-made-me-a-better-feminist
http://www.xojane.com/issues/why-my-ma-in-gender-studies-made-me-a-better-feministIssuesFri, 02 Nov 2012 06:00:00 -0700Jessie LochrieMy Birth Control Gave Me A Mental Breakdown<!-- tml-version="2" --><p>I can count the number of times I’ve had sex without condoms on one hand. This isn’t to brag about how I’m some model of safe sex -- it’s because with the exception of a brief, two-week period, I have never been on birth control. I’m not sure if I ever really made an active decision not to go on birth control. When I lost my virginity to my long-term high school boyfriend, we used those lubricated Trojans in the turquoise pack that so many people seem to use as My Very First Condom.</p><p>My reluctance to go on the Pill did partially stem from a teenager’s nervousness about telling my parents I was sexually active, though I always could have gone to Planned Parenthood (or my family doctor) and gone on birth control without them knowing. The real reason I avoided birth control was a gut feeling that I wouldn’t respond well to hormones.</p><p>As someone who has always been fairly in tune with my body and prone to moodiness, the thought of pumping artificial hormones into my body was something I just knew, intuitively, wasn’t a good idea for me. I told myself there were other reasons -- I don’t want to gain weight, I don’t want to lose my sex drive, I won’t remember to take it. But it was always just that the idea didn’t quite sit right. I gave myself other reasons because it seemed silly to say <em>I just know</em>. Those first few teenage years without BC were sometimes nerve-wracking -- I remember in particular one situation that ended with me getting an older friend to purchase the morning-after pill for me while I lurked behind him in the stationary aisle. (You can’t get the morning-after pill without a prescription under the age of 18, and I was a few months shy of that marker.) <em>[Ed Note:&nbsp;Though we are unable to determine when the author wrote this article, we would like you to know that as of 2009, EC <a href="http://www.planbonestep.com/where-to-get-plan-b.aspx">is available without a prescription to those 17 and older</a>.]</em></p><p>As time went on, though, I grew more and more settled in my choice. Condoms really weren’t so bad, and even if I were on birth control, I would still be using them, both for the added reassurance against pregnancy and for STI protection. (One of the benefits of condoms that I find weirdly reassuring is that if you mess up, you have immediate physical evidence. With a 5-second glance you can tell if the condom broke or if there was some other mishap. Also, nothing makes a dude slap on a rubber faster than the words “I’m not on birth control.”)</p><p>I told myself that once I was in a long-term relationship, I would reconsider. For the time being, condoms were working out just fine.</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01bba49a60019512"><figure><img src="http://a5.files.xojane.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI0ODc0Mzk3MDg4NzI5MDk4.jpg" /></figure></div><p>In the winter of 2011, I was in a serious relationship and living with my boyfriend. In terms of my mental health I was feeling better than I had in a while, and I figured that after all these years I might as well give it a shot -- the worst case scenario was that I would simply go off it, right?</p><p>I went to my college’s health services and after a five-minute chat with a nurse walked away with my purse stuffed with samples of NuvaRing. I put the excess in the fridge, since they need to be maintained at a certain temperature, and inserted the first one. I had plenty of friends on the Ring, many of whom loved it, and in my research I found that it had the lowest dose of hormones of any hormonal BC. It seemed like the best possible option. Within days, I found myself deeply, deeply depressed. I’d been having panic attacks for years, but they grew more and more frequent, and soon I was having them on a near-daily basis.</p><p>We were on winter break from school and living in New York City; I had grand plans of using my time off to do all the things I didn’t have time to do while a full-time student -- go to the Met for an entire day, wander around Central Park, see the friends I had neglected during finals, try those restaurants I never went to.</p><p>Instead, I spent two weeks locked inside my apartment, completely agoraphobic.</p><p>On the rare occasions I took the subway into Manhattan from my Brooklyn apartment, I found myself fighting and then wiping away tears on the L train while praying no one noticed, an embarrassing ritual that everyone living in New York goes through at some point.</p><p>But there was no rational explanation for my sudden crying jag, or all the others that were happening -- the tears would just come upon me with no warning. I had a full-on meltdown inside the Whole Foods in Union Square -- I remember standing in the middle of the floor, crying, unable to move, until an Internet acquaintance happened to walk by.</p><p>“Anna?” I said, and when she turned to me, I quite literally threw myself into her arms. “You just appeared like an angel,” I wept into her shoulder, unspeakably grateful for this lifeline I had been thrown.</p><p>She hugged me until I composed myself and could go back home; if she hadn’t walked by I wonder how long I would have stood there.A lifelong insomniac, I found myself completely unable to sleep at night. I was newly terrified of the dark, and would have a panic attack if the lights were off, so my boyfriend slept with the lights on each night while I sat awake on my laptop next to him in bed. When he left for work in the morning, I would sleep until he got back that afternoon, at which point he would coax me out of bed and try to get some food in me; I wasn’t eating either. I wouldn’t leave the house without him, I wouldn’t do anything without him.</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01bba49a8002c80a"><figure><img src="http://a1.files.xojane.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI0ODc0Mzk3ODkzODY0MDY3.jpg" /></figure></div><p>One night at three or four AM, I shook him awake, sobbing. He sleepily asked what was wrong, and I said, gasping for air, “I can’t stop thinking about killing myself.” The next day he announced that we were taking the Ring out.</p><p>I protested wildly, saying that I was just adjusting, that the first few months were always a bit difficult. Until he mentioned it, it hadn’t occurred to me at all that my sudden, severe change in mood was because of the birth control.</p><p>We ended up in the bathroom, with him more or less pinning me down while he took the Ring out -- I couldn’t reach it myself, and I was so determined to keep it in, to really give it a try, that I would never have removed it on my own. I cried the entire time, of course.I had been on the Ring for two weeks. Within hours of its removal, I felt my mood lift. For the first time since I had inserted it, I felt like myself again. But once the birth control had triggered it, the effects of my episode stayed with me, and I was deeply depressed that entire spring.</p><p>I had taken a full course load every semester previously, but that spring I ended up dropping all of my classes except one. A month after going off birth control, I was still having suicidal ideation that led to me making an emergency appointment with my college’s counseling services and going on behavioral medication for the first time in my life.</p><p>Even by summer, I was still so mentally ill that I took the fall semester off, staying at home in Massachusetts while my now ex-boyfriend returned to New York. I went to therapy and found an amazing psychiatrist and did a lot of yoga, and when I went back to New York almost exactly a year after first going on the Pill, I was the best version of myself I had been in a long time.</p><p>More than a few people made a mention of having the “old Jessie” back, when in reality I was happier and better functioning than I had been for all of my teen years. I had been depressed and anxious for a long time, and I don’t entirely blame the hormones for my breakdown -- I am certain that I would have had a similar episode eventually. The Pill just made it come upon me sooner. The comparison I made light-heartedly to friends was that the Ring was like a horcrux in Harry Potter. It took control of me, made me different, made me darker -- and the last thing I wanted to do was remove it. I fought fiercely to keep it, entirely unable to connect it to my misery. When we talk about it now, I call those months “the dark times,” and that’s all I need to say. It’s been about a year and a half since that day when I walked home laden with NuvaRings, and I’m not on birth control. I don’t see myself on birth control for a long time.</p><p>Perhaps, if I am feeling very, very stable and am in a long-term relationship again, I will give it a try -- this time with a format or type of hormone that is as unlike the Ring as possible. An IUD is still an option I am mulling over, as there are non-hormonal versions, but I fear their effect on my blessedly painless periods.</p><p>I’m back to condoms, which I’m completely happy with. (Want recommendations? I’ve got ‘em.) This is only one story, one anecdote. In no way do I mean to disparage the Pill; since its introduction in 1960, it has changed millions of women’s lives for the better. It changed mine, too -- that gut feeling I had when I was 17 was right. Still, I don’t regret any of it. The breakdown I suffered that winter had been brewing on the horizon for years, and like all natural disasters, it wasn’t a question of if it would hit me, but when.</p><p>With any luck, the worst is behind me.</p>The comparison I made light-heartedly to friends was that the Ring was like a horcrux in Harry Potter. It took control of me, made me different, made me darker -- and the last thing I wanted to do was remove it. http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/nuvaring-depression
http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/nuvaring-depressionIt Happened To MeWed, 01 Aug 2012 12:00:50 -0700Jessie Lochrie